The 5 Best Solar Prominence Images Ever Captured

A solar prominence is not a flare. Flares are sudden flashes of X-rays and extreme ultraviolet light from a magnetic reconnection blast. Prominences are cooler, denser loops and sheets of plasma — typically tens of thousands of degrees, glowing in hydrogen-alpha — held above the Sun’s surface by magnetic fields. Seen against the dark sky at the limb they look pink or red; silhouetted against the bright disk they are dark filaments. When those fields snap or rise, the structure can erupt for hundreds of thousands of kilometers. The best photographs of that moment are among the most dramatic images in all of astronomy.

This ranking is about the images themselves: clarity, scale, historical weight, and how often a frame is still cited decades later. Each entry names the telescope or spacecraft, the date, roughly how tall the plasma stood in Earths, and why the shot became iconic. One of them — Japan’s Norikura arch of July 31, 1992 — is circulating again on X; it belongs on any shortlist of the best prominence photographs ever taken.

1. Solar Orbiter’s giant eruption — February 15, 2022

Captured by: ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter, Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) Full Sun Imager
Date: February 15, 2022
Scale: tracked out to about 3.5 million km (~5 solar radii; tens of Earth diameters stacked end to end)
Why it’s iconic: largest prominence eruption ever recorded in a single frame that still shows the full solar disc

Most big eruptions are either cropped close to the limb or hidden behind a coronagraph’s occulting disk. Solar Orbiter’s Full Sun Imager was built with an unusually wide field of view, so on February 15, 2022 it could keep the entire Sun in frame while the prominence streamed millions of kilometers into space. ESA called it the largest such event captured together with the full disc. The blast was aimed away from Earth; SOHO’s coronagraphs picked up the same cloud farther out. For the first time, scientists could watch how a giant prominence connected back to the disc without stitching separate instruments by eye.

2. Norikura’s 590,000-kilometer arch — July 31, 1992

Captured by: 10-cm coronagraph, Norikura Solar Observatory (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan); photographer Hideaki Miyazaki
Date: July 31, 1992, 01:28 UTC (Hα)
Scale: peak height about 590,000 km — roughly 46 Earth diameters, nearly half a solar radius
Why it’s iconic: a textbook helical eruptive arch, co-observed in radio and soft X-rays, and still one of the most shared prominence photos on the web

After morning fog cleared over Norikura, the prominence rose slowly (~30 km/s), then accelerated. By 01:37 UTC it stood about 590,000 kilometers high, with the tip racing outward near 220 km/s. The Hα frame shows a clean arch and, at the tip, a helical twist that traces tangled magnetic field lines — rare to see so clearly from the ground. Yohkoh soft X-rays and the brand-new Nobeyama Radioheliograph caught the same event, linking the cool prominence to a hot arcade underneath. That multi-wavelength coverage is why solar physicists still cite the shot; the sheer silhouette is why it keeps going viral.

3. SDO’s August 31, 2012 filament eruption

Captured by: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), Atmospheric Imaging Assembly
Date: August 31, 2012
Scale: the erupting filament spans hundreds of thousands of kilometers; Earth insets in popular crops make the size visceral
Why it’s iconic: the defining “giant prominence” still of the SDO era — sharp, colorful, and endlessly reused as a header image

SDO watches the Sun almost continuously in multiple extreme-ultraviolet channels. On August 31, 2012 a long filament along the limb lifted off and blossomed into a coronal mass ejection. The AIA frames resolve fine strands and the dark cool plasma against a million-degree corona in a way film-era Hα could not. Public-domain releases with an Earth-to-scale inset turned the event into one of NASA’s most-recognized solar pictures. It is also this article’s featured image for a reason: it still looks like science fiction, and every pixel is real.

4. SOHO’s whip-like prominence — July 30, 2002

Captured by: ESA/NASA SOHO, Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) at 304 Å
Date: July 30, 2002
Scale: a long, whip-like eruptive prominence still attached at one end — gone in the next 6-hour frame
Why it’s iconic: a classic “Best of SOHO” still that taught a generation what an eruptive prominence looks like in helium-304 light

SOHO’s EIT 304 Å channel images the upper chromosphere at roughly 60,000 K, where prominences glow brightly. The July 30, 2002 frame shows a slender, curved structure peeling away from the limb — one foot still rooted, the rest already unbound. Six hours later it had left the field of view. Alongside SOHO’s other famous 2002 prominence shots (including the July 1 “molten curl” with an Earth inset), the whip image became a stock illustration in textbooks and agency galleries for how cool plasma can hang in, then escape, the hot corona.

5. The Grand Daddy — June 4, 1946

Captured by: Climax Observatory (High Altitude Observatory), Hα photograph
Date: June 4, 1946
Scale: about 200,000 km above the surface — Earth would fit under the arch with room to spare (~15+ Earth diameters)
Why it’s iconic: the pre-space-age yardstick for “huge prominence,” still taught as HAO’s Grand Daddy

Decades before SOHO or SDO, observers at Climax, Colorado, photographed a towering Hα prominence that became known as the Grand Daddy. The bright arc marking the solar limb and the dark, towering structure above it made the size obvious even on glass plate: roughly 200,000 kilometers tall. HAO educators still use the frame to explain that the biggest prominences are rarely static — they are already expanding outward in an eruptive phase. Every later “largest ever” claim quietly competes with this 1946 silhouette.

Prominence vs flare, in one paragraph

Flares light up and fade in minutes; their damage to radio links and satellites comes from radiation and particle storms. Prominences are the slow-building arches and filaments that can erupt into coronal mass ejections — the plasma clouds that drive geomagnetic storms days later. The five images above freeze that eruptive geometry: cool plasma, magnetic scaffolding, and scales that make Earth look like a marble. For safe backyard views of living prominences (not these rare giants), hydrogen-alpha solar telescopes and certified solar filters are the tools — never an unfiltered optic pointed at the Sun.

Further reading